Mollie Hemingway Commentary: Taking on the Establishment

Before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s political advisors were thinking about the president’s re-election bid and noticed a curious commonality among incumbent presidents who didn’t get re-elected: they all faced challengers from within their own party.

Five U.S. presidents since 1900 have lost their bids for a second term. William Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. While each election is determined by unique factors, all five of these failed incumbents dealt with internal party fights or serious primary challenges.

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: A Time of Chaos Upon Chaos Atop Chaos

America will weather its current hysterias.

But the tensions and furor are reminiscent of the last generations of the Roman Republic. In its last century, Romans began to adjudicate politics by obsequious partisan town criers (their version of our media), mass demonstrations, and freelance street gangs. Looters, arsonists, and demonstrators did pretty much as they pleased in the streets of Rome without fear of legal consequences.

In our time, the media has now vanished – kaput, no more, ended.

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Commentary: The Pale Pastel Republicans for Socialism

The man was a walking political disaster.

He was “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.” His positions were “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.” He was horrifyingly “foolhardy,” and a Republican Party in his hands was headed for a certain “crushing defeat … that could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.” The man was putting the GOP in “an impossible situation” because he was a “sure-loser in November” who held “extreme and too simple views.”

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Commentary: #VoteBlueNoMatterWho Is No Match for #NeverSanders

Almost everything the Democratic Left said about Donald Trump causing a Republican Party implosion proved untrue – and yet is proving true this year of the Democrats.

Trump’s agenda, for the most part, was Reaganesque, with a few important exceptions – closing the border and enforcing immigration law, getting tough with China’s unfair trade policies, restoring assembly and manufacturing jobs to the hollowed-out interior, avoiding optional wars abroad, and trying to drain the proverbial federal swamp of its careerist bureaucrats and revolving-door apparatchiks.

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Commentary: Just Like 2016, NeverTrump Republicans Would Rather Lose Than Face Another Term with President Trump

Donald Trump’s chances for reelection in November have never been higher. The latest Gallup poll puts his approval rating at 49 percent, other polls have measured even higher, and he just gave the speech of his life in his 2020 State of the Union address. But watch out. Without Republican control of the Senate in 2020, much less recovering control of the House of Representatives, the impact of a second Trump term will be profoundly diminished.

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Commentary: The Heavy Wages of Trump Fixation

Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

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Commentary: Anti-Trump Fraternity and NeverTrump Sorority Collude in Impeachment Scam

How stupid does the anti-Trump fraternity think the American people are? By “anti-Trump fraternity” I mean not only the increasingly frantic Democrats who, like Belshazzar at that memorable dinner party many years back, can see the writing ever more clearly on the wall for 2020, but also the NeverTrump sorority who just cannot get over the fact that someone was elected president of the United States without their permission, indeed, over their explicit objections. How dare they!

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Commentary: Trump vs. the ‘Stepford Wife’ Republicans

When the protagonist in Ira Levin’s novel, The Stepford Wives, begins to suspect that other women in her Connecticut town are robots, she surmises:

That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

Which brings to mind the viral video of Mitt Romney reacting to his Twinkie birthday cake. Lack of ample bosom aside, Mitt is a great example of someone playing a housewife unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real. He is a Stepford-Wife Republican.

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Rep Justin Amash, Who Recently Left GOP, Says He’s Not Ruling Out a Presidential Bid

by Chuck Ross   Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, who announced July 4 that he is leaving the Republican party, said Sunday that he is not ruling out a run for president. “I still wouldn’t rule anything like that out,” Amash told CNN’s Jake Tapper when asked if he is considering a presidential bid. Amash did not give a timeline for when he will decide whether to run, saying that “it’s not something that’s right on my radar right now.” Amash, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, announced in a July 4 op-ed in The Washington Post that he was “declaring my independence” from the GOP. “I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us. I’m asking you to believe that we can do better than this two-party system — and to work toward it. If we continue to take America for granted, we will lose it,” he wrote.  On May 18, Amash became the first Republican in Congress to call for Trump to be impeached in the wake of the special counsel’s investigation. Amash said that Trump engaged in “impeachable conduct,” and that Attorney General William Barr had “deliberately” misrepresented special counsel…

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Commentary: Tedious, Entitled, Ignoble and Mad – the Anti-Trump Circus Turns Four Years Old

by Victor Davis Hanson   We are now in the fourth year of an anti-Trump mania, and about reaching the point of caricature. The Left should have learned something after the failed celebrity appeal to undermine the Electoral College, the initial articles of impeachment, the empty invocations of the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, and the 25th Amendment, the 22-month, $35 million Mueller investigation deflation, the periodical silly “bombshell” announcements of perennially wrong and comical Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the pathetic palace coup attempt of Andrew McCabe, the assassination chic from the likes of Madonna, Snoop Dogg, or Kathy Griffin, or the deification of the slimy prophet Michael Avenatti. Not at all. An entire new cast of carnival characters has arrived on the scene to take up where the now imploded Left off. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) has replaced Schiff in the unhinged congressional investigative limelight. In his latest hearing, Nadler obtusely insisted on addressing former Trump White House aide Hope Hicks as “Ms. Lewandowski.” Even Democrats were puzzled – given that Nadler’s supposed “slip of the tongue” was repeated three times until Hicks finally corrected him. Even in the age of gender transitioning and speech reduced to Twitter-like grunts, sane…

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Britain’s Version of the Never-Trumpers May Bring Down the Government Over Brexit

by Ben Whedon   The British version of the “Never-Trump” movement may force the next prime minister from power in order to prevent a “no-deal Brexit,” if high-ranking Conservative Party members of Parliament follow through on their threats. Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond said in May he “couldn’t support a government policy stance that said as a matter of choice we are going to pursue a no-deal exit” in an interview with Sky News. “I will act in what I believe is the best interest of this country,” he added on the question of whether he would back a no-confidence vote of his own party over the issue. Hammond and other so-called “Remoaners” support either the cancellation of Brexit outright or at least a withdrawal agreement with the European Union limiting the scope of the United Kingdom’s departure, called a “soft” Brexit. Much like the Never-Trump Republicans, Remoaners are members of the ruling party so opposed to its own agenda (and the results of a democratic election) that they are willing to bring down their own government. They hold this position in opposition to the results of a democratic referendum. The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a 2016 referendum…

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Commentary: Mainstream Media’s Agitprop Distorts Trump’s Actions to Help Protect Trillions in Crony Globalist Status Quo

by Edward Ring   Competing investigations and alternative analyses offer partisans on both sides ample fodder to feed their biases, but a presumption that guilt can be manufactured if it doesn’t exist is the common thread pushing them. Just as the Soviets knew in Stalinist Russia, if you look at anyone long enough, you’re going to find something to use against them. Instead of dispatching political opponents with bullets to the back of the head, however, we Americans fight with politicized investigations, attorneys, and political grandstanding. And on the side of America’s anti-Trump shadow government, deep state, establishment bureaucracy, the media closes ranks and takes every opportunity to distort the truth in favor of an agenda. Recent reporting provides yet another example of the establishment media’s Stalinesque anti-Trump bias. President Trump on Wednesday canceled a meeting to discuss infrastructure legislation with House leadership, because immediately prior to the meeting, he was blindsided by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) holding a meeting with pro-impeachment lawmakers, where she “emphasized that the White House is engaging in a ‘cover-up’.” Some news accounts suggest that Trump planned to cancel the meeting and hold a press conference instead, based on the fact that a “no collusion, no obstruction” sign had been…

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Trump Hits Back Against GOP Rep Who Took Stance On Impeachment: ‘Justin Is A Loser’

by Evie Fordham   President Donald Trump criticized Republican Michigan Rep. Justin Amash on Twitter after the congressman said Saturday that Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct” related to the Mueller investigation. “Never a fan of Justin Amash, a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy,” Trump wrote Sunday. Never a fan of @justinamash, a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy. If he actually read the biased Mueller Report, “composed” by 18 Angry Dems who hated Trump,…. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 19, 2019 “If he actually read the biased Mueller Report, ‘composed’ by 18 Angry [Democrats] who hated Trump, he would see that it was nevertheless strong on NO COLLUSION and, ultimately, NO OBSTRUCTION… Anyway, how do you Obstruct when there is no crime and, in fact, the crimes were committed by the other side? Justin is a loser who sadly plays right into our opponents hands!” he continued. Amash took his stand on impeachment Saturday in a tweet after reading special counsel Robert Mueller’s report…

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Commentary: #NeverTrump GOP Senators Messing with Donald Trump Jr.

by George Rasley   Just when you thought that #NeverTrump Republicans in the Senate might, just might be ready to “move on” as Majority Leader McConnell put it, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (an alleged Republican) has subpoenaed the President’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr to testify on matters related to the Mueller investigation. The Don Jr has already testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in December of 2017, as part of their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. And the Mueller report made no recommendations against him. But Burr, not generally thought of the sharpest knife in the Senate’s GOP drawer, apparently decided to give the Democrats, including his odious Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA), one more opportunity to grandstand for the cameras and to set a perjury trap for Don Jr. According to ABC News, a source close to Don Jr. said there was an agreement between the president’s son and the committee that he would only have to come in and testify once as long as he was willing to stay for as long as they’d like, which the source said he did, having stayed with the panel for more than nine hours back…

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Commentary: Mitt Romney Is a Virtue Signaling Twit

by George Rasley   Leave it to Mitt Romney to be the first Republican (notice we didn’t say conservative) to use the Mueller Report to criticize President Trump. After the redacted report was released Romney issued a statement saying he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President.” I have now read the redacted Mueller report and offer my personal reaction: pic.twitter.com/ACnExskqXJ — Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) April 19, 2019 This hypocritical virtue signaling would be comical if it weren’t so destructive – after all the Mitt Romney who is complaining about “dishonesty and misdirection” from the White House is the same Mitt Romney whose staff said he planned to “shake the Etch A Sketch” after the 2012 primaries and abandon the conservative positions he had taken to get the GOP nomination for president. The comments for which Romney criticized President Trump were entirely justified expressions of outrage emanating from a man who knew he was wrongly accused and being set-up for the kind of process crimes that ensnared others, such as Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos. But this is hardly the first time Romney…

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Kasich Launches New Non-Profit With Fellow Never-Trumpers, Announces Fifth Book

Former Gov. John Kasich has launched a new non-profit with several fellow never-Trumpers and is planning to release his fifth book amid endless speculation that he may make another run for the White House. Almost immediately after leaving the Ohio Governor’s Residence, Kasich announced that he was joining CNN as a senior political commentator. Now he has launched a non-profit with several prominent Trump critics called “Two Paths America,” based on the title of his 2017 book “Two Paths: America Divided or United.” “A dozen of America’s most prominent thought leaders have been named as members of a new National Advisory Committee for Two Paths America, helping to promote center-right solutions to some of the major issues facing our nation,” the non-profit’s website states. Among those who have joined the effort are Bill Kristol, former editor-at-large of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. “Two Paths America is a non-profit 501(c)4 organization created to promote reasonable and proven solutions to America’s challenges,” the group’s website states. “Two Paths America is focused broadly on public policy that encourages a Balanced Budget Amendment to the United States…

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Commentary: The Clarity Accompanying the Democrats’ Takeover of Congress

by Julie Kelly   Months before the midterm elections last fall, several self-described “conservatives” implored Americans to vote for Democrats. Still stung that Republicans ignored their advice to reject Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and unmoved by Trump’s solid record of conservative accomplishments in office, these embittered outcasts claimed that a legislative branch controlled by Democrats would cauterize Trump’s alleged “authoritarian” tendencies. The most notable of these windmill tilters, attacking an authoritarian impulse that wasn’t there, was George Will. For decades, Will occupied a vaunted perch in the hierarchy of the conservative commentariat. He also was deemed acceptable by media outlets hostile to the Right including the Washington Post, where he now is a contributor. Disgusted at the Trumpification of the Grand Old Party in 2016, Will officially renounced his party affiliation just weeks before the Republican National Convention. Two years later, in a disorganized rant, Will instructed voters to oust Republicans from power. “In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream,” Will wrote in June 2018. “A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and…

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Commentary: An American Epidemic of Toxic Imbecility

by Thaddeus G. McCotter   I’m a doctor. Fine, I’m a doctor of laws not of medicine. But I can scroll Web, M.D. as well as anyone, so believe you me – forget all the other scourges ravaging our free republic, even if (nay, especially if) they are afflicting you. Those scourges are mere distractions from the root cause of our impending doom. No, I’m not talking about climate change/global warming/new Ice Age or whatever current false alarm the Left is sounding, for that false alarm is itself is a symptom of the new scourge; and, at the risk of sounding alarmist, our demise may well occur within the next twelve years. For, as President Abraham Lincoln ominously noted, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” And Mr. Lincoln wasn’t just talking about Jussie Smollett paying for his hoax hate crime with a check. What is this postmodern plague consuming our nation? Toxic imbecility. And where is the hot zone where this imbecilic chicken first came home to roost and now appears ready to cook our goose? An educated guess is that it’s wherever educators…

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OFF THE RECORD: Bill Lee’s Anti-Trump Chief of Staff Blake Harris Setting the Personnel Agenda

President Donald Trump carried 92 of Tennessee’s 95 counties against Hillary Clinton in 2016 with a 61 percent to 35 percent margin. He retains an extraordinarily high approval rating among Tennessee Republicans, polling consistently above 84 percent. Trump’s support for Marsha Blackburn was a critical factor in her 11 point victory gap over Democrat Phil Bredesen in the 2018 Senate race. During his primary campaign for Governor, Bill Lee embraced Donald Trump and even ran a television ad that pointed out that Trump has been “so effective” because he’s a “businessman, not a politician.” Trump’s endorsement of Lee in the general election, along with the endorsement of key in-state Trump supporters like former State Senator Mae Beavers, helped Lee to a 20 plus point margin over Karl Dean.  The 2018 Republican Primary for Governor ended up with Lee prevailing over Diane “Too Swamp” Black and Randy “Too Moderate” Boyd because — like Goldilocks selecting a bed — he was “just right” for Christian conservatives and Trump voters in the state. You might think that Governor-elect Lee would be setting the foundations for his policy agenda by appointing those who were ideologically aligned with Candidate Lee to top positions in his…

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Commentary: The Rise of the Republican #WalkAways – And Why No One Cares

by Troy Worden   You might have heard about the #WalkAway Movement, in which disaffected Democrats say farewell to their party due to its hard-left turn. But you might not have heard much about an identical movement of disaffected Republicans leaving their party, though it’s not because it isn’t happening. It’s just that nobody cares. Nobody cares about recent pieces in The Atlantic, Washington Post, and other liberal papers detailing former Republicans’ disaffection with their party, even if they were published in the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s highly contentious nomination to the Supreme Court. Indeed, very few people cared about the exodus of other, more prominent conservatives from the party, among them campaign strategist Steve Schmidt and columnist George Will. This isn’t to say Schmidt or Will or others—Bill Kristol, David French, and Jonah Goldberg among them—are not intelligent figures who sincerely believe that they are defending the principles of “true conservatism.” They can be mistaken without being insincere. All due respect for their work on behalf of a cause we once thought we shared in common. Now, however, we have to be honest. Many of them are cashing in on their Trump Derangement Syndrome, bigly. Kristol says he’s still…

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Commentary: The White House Is No Place for Resistance

by Robert Romano   White House Chief of Staff John Kelly needs to serve up whoever wrote the Sept. 5 anonymous New York Times oped, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” or he needs to go and President Donald Trump needs to find a new chief of staff who will get control of those men and women who have the privilege of serving in the White House. The oped contends, dramatically, that “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda” and “I would know. I am one of them.” The oped offers very few specifics over which policy disagreements led to the drafting of the oped. But what it alleges is that there is a conspiracy in the White House to undermine the constitutionally elected, sitting President of the United States and the agenda he ran on. This goes to the heart of the President’s sole authority in executing the laws of the United States under Article II of the Constitution. The White House is a place where robust deliberations should be had, but, at the end of the day, the President decides the direction the administration…

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Roger Kimball Commentary: Burying the Dead With Bile-Filled Histrionics

by Roger Kimball   The big news last week revolved around the funerals of a 1960s pop singer and an unreliable Republican senator with a cult following among masochistic conservatives and cynical leftists eager to capitalize on his capacity to spread dissension among his nominal allies. I suppose the exploitation of funerals for grubby political ends is nothing new. Mark Antony did it with notable success when he eulogized Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. But there was something especially stomach-churning about the injection of partisan animus into the obsequies of Aretha Franklin and John McCain. Both were reminders—as if we needed any—of how these jangled, hyperpartisan times have the capacity to infect even the most solemn ceremonies of life with bile-filled histrionics, our latter-day version of the theater of the absurd. The race hustling reverends Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson led the bandwagon at Franklin’s funeral, loading their praise of the soul singer with vicious anti-Trump rhetoric. Dyson described the president of the United States as an “orange apparition,” a “lugubrious leech,” a “dictator” and “fascist.” Nicely done, Reverend! The tone at John McCain’s spectacle was more restrained but the message of hatred and contempt for the president was just…

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Trump Derangement Syndrome Case #47563: Bill Kristol Considering Run For President In 2020

Bill Kristol, #NeverTrump

by Peter Hasson   Bill Kristol, the former editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard, is considering challenging President Donald Trump in the 2020 Republican primary. Kristol, consistently one of the most vocal anti-Trump Republicans during the 2016 campaign, has been considering a run for months, a source familiar with Kristol’s thinking told The Daily Caller News Foundation. Kristol, who remains an editor-at-large for the Standard, said he has no plans to run but declined to rule it out when asked by TheDCNF. “No plans to run. But I’m randomly in Boston today, and happen to have had lunch with someone who does a lot of work in New Hampshire,” Kristol wrote in an email. “As he’d say, ‘Ya nevah know.’” The New Hampshire primary, the second electoral contest after the Iowa Caucuses, is a key hurdle in the presidential nominating process. Kristol previously sparked 2020 rumors in March when he popped up in New Hampshire to speak at “a must-show event for potential presidential contenders,” as Inside Sources noted at the time. Kristol has consistently said that Trump needs to face a 2020 primary challenger. “We need to take one shot at liberating the Republican Party from Trump, and conservatism from Trumpism,”…

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Commentary: #NeverTrumpers Make It Plain They Enjoy Being Lonely Outside the Party

George Will, Max Boot, Donald Trump

by Jeffery Rendall   Are #NeverTrumpers loners or are they really just lonely? The question came to mind recently as the nebulous allegedly “conservative” anti-Trump group appears to be losing adherents and friends at an alarming rate. It’s not that President Donald Trump has suddenly become so popular that it’s no longer fashionable to oppose him; maybe it’s because the #NeverTrump group has just run out of things to criticize the president for. Whatever the reason more conservatives have taken to kicking the GOP intra-party opposition where it hurts with many a commentator treating #NeverTrump with the same contempt as they would Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. Nerdy bespectacled intellectual George Will perhaps triggered the bash-#NeverTrump revelry a couple weeks ago when he encouraged conservatives to vote Democrat this November instead of for Trump-enabling Republicans. The #NeverTrump suicide-fest continued last week with several more establishment Republicans declaring independence and urging the ultra-disgruntled to do the unthinkable: go Democrat. Then one-time highly respected right-leaning (neoconservative) writer Max Boot took his turn at pleading for the minority party. Boot wrote last week at The Washington Post, “No one anticipated Trump’s takeover. It’s possible, these [#NeverTrump] Republicans argue, that we might be equally surprised by his downfall. Imagine…

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Commentary: The Perfidious Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney & Orrin Hatch

by George Rasley   That didn’t take long. As soon as President Trump endorsed Mitt Romney’s candidacy to succeed Utah’s retiring Senator Orin Hatch and voters in the Beehive State handed the nomination to Romney (even though he actually lost the GOP State Convention vote) Mitt showed his true colors by back-stabbing Trump. Romney told MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt, in an interview that aired Sunday evening, that it is “too early” to say he will support President Trump in 2020, and just to make things perfectly clear, he said his prior prediction that Trump will get re-elected was not an endorsement. “I also think Gavin Newsom will get elected [as governor] in California. That’s not something I want to see, it’s just something that’s probably going to happen,” Romney added. Romney was also prompted to speak about whether he wants a Republican to challenge Trump in a 2020 primary. “There will be people who decide, I presume, to get in a Republican primary,” he said in reply to a question from Ms. Hunt reported by our friend Daniel Chaitin of the Washington Examiner. But Romney’s perfidy was well-telegraphed before he appeared on Far Left network MSNBC. In a Salt Lake Tribune op-ed headlined, “Where I stand…

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Commentary: Who Better Understands the Concerns and Frustrations of Conservatives, George Will or Donald Trump?

George Will, Donald Trump

by Jeffery Rendall   It should come as no surprise to observers of American politics that nearly two years after Donald Trump was formally nominated as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate – and a year and a half after he assumed the office – his “conservative” #NeverTrump adversaries are still after him. These spoiled, pampered and snobby pseudo-Republicans won’t let bygones be bygones and acknowledge the plethora of positive things Trump brought the GOP and the conservative cause since taking center stage in the White House on January 20, 2017. Simply put, Trump (thus far) has been the most refreshing political surprise of a half-century. Perhaps starting with his choice of full-spectrum principled conservative Mike Pence as his running mate (and future vice president), Trump’s made one good decision after another, usually tilting the political balance towards the right side of the scale. Still there are those refusing to give Trump his due; these malcontents snipe at his flanks, mostly by decrying his past personal history, his current behavior and his fondness for punching back at critics via Twitter or his always entertaining but never conventional press appearances. Despite this, few in the nebulous #NeverTrump contingent have come flat out…

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Lame Duck Republican Senator Jeff Flake Blocks Trump Judicial Nominees Over Tariffs

Jeff Flake, Donald Trump

by Kevin Daley   Outgoing GOP Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is blocking votes on all of President Donald Trump’s appeals court nominees to secure concessions from Republican leaders on tariffs and Cuban travel restrictions. Flake, a Trump antagonist who is not seeking reelection amid floundering popularity with Arizona Republicans, has not openly addressed the matter, though his seat on a closely divided Senate Judiciary Committee gives him significant leverage over judgeships. Roll Call first reported that Flake halted a committee vote on Georgia Supreme Court Justice Britt Grant’s nomination to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeals court based in Atlanta. CNN confirmed late Wednesday that the senator will block all appeals court nominees to prompt discussions on relations with Cuba and the president’s escalating trade war with much of the industrial world. Flake is one of 11 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which issues recommendations on judicial nominees before a final confirmation vote. The GOP has a one-vote majority on the panel, making Flake’s cooperation essential if Republicans wish to process candidates. As of this writing, there are 10 appeals court nominees pending before the committee, including a candidate for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals,…

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Bill Kristol’s Son-in-Law: I Hired Fusion GPS in Primary to Dig Up Dirt on Donald Trump

Matthew Continetti, the editor of the neo-conservative website, the Washington Free Beacon, wrote in a letter posted online just after 7 p.m. on Friday that the Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS during the Republican primary to do research on Republican candidates. That research kicked off what became known as the “dossier” used to smear Donald Trump.…

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